The Vampire Project

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Two hundred years after the Salem witch trials,
farmers became convinced that their relatives were returning from the
grave to feed on the living

Children playing near a hillside gravel mine found the first graves. One
ran home to tell his mother, who was skeptical at first—until the boy
produced a skull.

Because this was Griswold, Connecticut, in 1990, police initially
thought the burials might be the work of a local serial killer named
Michael Ross, and they taped off the area as a crime scene. But the
brown, decaying bones turned out to be more than a century old. The
Connecticut state archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni, soon determined that
the hillside contained a colonial-era farm cemetery. New England is full
of such unmarked family plots, and the 29 burials were typical of the
1700s and early 1800s: The dead, many of them children, were laid to
rest in thrifty Yankee style, in simple wood coffins, without jewelry or
even much clothing, their arms resting by their sides or crossed over
their chests.

Except, that is, for Burial Number 4.

Bellantoni was interested in the grave even before the excavation
began. It was one of only two stone crypts in the cemetery, and it was
partially visible from the mine face.

Scraping away soil with flat-edged shovels, and then brushes and
bamboo picks, the archaeologist and his team worked through several feet
of earth before reaching the top of the crypt. When Bellantoni lifted
the first of the large, flat rocks that formed the roof, he uncovered
the remains of a red-painted coffin and a pair of skeletal feet. They
lay, he remembers, “in perfect anatomical position.” But when he raised
the next stone, Bellantoni saw that the rest of the individual “had been
com­pletely...rearranged.” The skeleton had been beheaded; skull and
thighbones rested atop the ribs and vertebrae. “It looked like a
skull-and-crossbones motif, a Jolly Roger. I’d never seen anything like
it,” Bellantoni recalls.

Subsequent analysis showed that the beheading, along with other
injuries, including rib fractures, occurred roughly five years after
death. Somebody had also smashed the coffin.

The other skeletons in the gravel hillside were packaged for
reburial, but not “J.B.,” as the 50ish male skeleton from the 1830s came
to be called, because of the initials spelled out in brass tacks on his
coffin lid. He was shipped to the National Museum of Health and
Medicine, in Washington, D.C., for further study. Meanwhile, Bellantoni
started networking. He invited archaeologists and historians to tour the
excavation, soliciting theories. Simple vandalism seemed unlikely, as
did robbery, because of the lack of valuables at the site.

Finally, one colleague asked: “Ever heard of the Jewett City vampires?”

In 1854, in neighboring Jewett City, Connecticut, townspeople had
exhumed several corpses suspected to be vampires that were rising from
their graves to kill the living. A few newspaper accounts of these
events survived. Had the Griswold grave been desecrated for the same
reason?
In the course of his far-flung research, Bellantoni placed a
serendipitous phone call to Michael Bell, a Rhode Island folklorist, who
had devoted much of the previous decade to studying New England vampire
exhumations. The Griswold case occurred at roughly the same time as the
other incidents Bell had investigated. And the setting was right:
Griswold was rural, agrarian and bordering southern Rhode Island, where
multiple exhumations had occurred. Many of the other “vampires,” like
J.B., had been disinterred, grotesquely tampered with and reburied.

In light of the tales Bell told of violated corpses, even the
posthumous rib fractures began to make sense. J.B.’s accusers had likely
rummaged around in his chest cavity, hoping to remove, and perhaps to
burn, his heart.

***

Headquartered in a charming old schoolhouse, the Middletown
Historical Society typically promotes such fortifying topics as Rhode
Island gristmill restoration and Stone Wall Appreciation Day. Two nights
before Halloween, though, the atmosphere is full of dry ice vapors and
high silliness. Fake cobwebs cover the exhibits, warty gourds crowd the
shelves and a skeleton with keen red eyes cackles in the corner. “We’ll
turn him off when you start talking,” the society’s president assures
Michael Bell, who is readying his slide show.

Bell smiles. Although he lectures across the country and has
taught at colleges, including Brown University, he is used to people
having fun with his scholarship. “Vampires have gone from a source of
fear to a source of entertainment,” he says, a bit rueful. “Maybe I
shouldn’t trivialize entertainment, but to me it’s not anywhere as
interesting as what really happened.” Bell’s daughter, 37-year-old
Gillian, a member of the audience that night, has made futile attempts
to tempt her father with the Twilight series, but “there’s Buffy and Twilight,
and then there’s what my dad does,” she says. “I try to get him
interested in the pop culture stuff, but he wants to keep his mind
pure.” Indeed, Bell seems only mildly aware that the vampire—appearing
everywhere from True Blood to The Vampire Diaries— has once again sunk its fangs into the cultural jugular. As far as he’s concerned, the undead are always with us.

Bell wears his hair in a sleek silver bob and has a strong Roman
nose, but his extremely lean physique is evidence of a long-distance
running habit, not some otherworldly hunger. He favors black sweaters
and leather jackets, an ensemble he can easily accentuate with dark
sunglasses to fit in with the goth crowd, if research requires it. A
consulting folklorist at the Rhode Island Historical Preservation &
Heritage Commission for most of his career, Bell has been investigating
local vampires for 30 years now—long enough to watch lettering on
fragile slate gravestones fade before his eyes and prosperous
subdivisions arise beside once-lonely graveyards.

He has documented about 80 exhumations, reaching as far back as
the late 1700s and as far west as Minnesota. But most are concentrated
in backwoods New England, in the 1800s—startlingly later than the
obvious local analogue, the Salem, Massachusetts, witch hunts of the
1690s.

Hundreds more cases await discovery, he believes. “You read an
article that describes an exhumation, and they’ll describe a similar
thing that happened at a nearby town,” says Bell, whose book, Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires,
is seen as the last word on the subject, though he has lately found so
many new cases that there’s a second book on the way. “The ones that get
recorded, and I actually find them, are just the tip of the iceberg.”

Almost two decades after J.B.’s grave was discovered, it remains
the only intact archaeological clue to the fear that swept the region.
Most of the graves are lost to time (and even in the cases where they
aren’t, unnecessary exhumations are frowned on by the locals). Bell
mostly hunts for handwritten records in town hall basements, consults
tombstones and old cemetery maps, traces obscure genealogies and
interviews descendants. “As a folklorist, I’m interested in recurring
patterns in communication and ritual, as well as the stories that
accompany these rituals,” he says. “I’m interested in how this stuff is
learned and carried on and how its meaning changes from group to group,
and over time.” In part because the events were relatively recent,
evidence of historic vampires isn’t as scarce as one might imagine.
Incredulous city newspaper reporters dished about the “Horrible
Superstition” on front pages. A traveling minister describes an
exhumation in his daily log on September 3, 1810. (The “mouldy
Specticle,” he writes, was a “Solemn Site.”) Even Henry David Thoreau
mentions an exhumation in his journal on September 29, 1859.

Though scholars today still struggle to explain the vampire
panics, a key detail unites them: The public hysteria almost invariably
occurred in the midst of savage tuberculosis outbreaks. Indeed, the
medical museum’s tests ultimately revealed that J.B. had suffered from
tuberculosis, or a lung disease very like it. Typically, a rural family
contracted the wasting illness, and—even though they often received the
standard medical diagnosis—the survivors blamed early victims as
“vampires,” responsible for preying upon family members who subsequently
fell sick. Often an exhumation was called for, to stop the vampire’s
predations.

The particulars of the vampire exhumations, though, vary widely.
In many cases, only family and neighbors participated. But sometimes
town fathers voted on the matter, or medical doctors and clergymen gave
their blessings or even pitched in. Some communities in Maine and
Plymouth, Massachusetts, opted to simply flip the exhumed vampire
facedown in the grave and leave it at that. In Connecticut, Rhode Island
and Vermont, though, they frequently burned the dead person’s heart,
sometimes inhaling the smoke as a cure. (In Europe, too, exhumation
protocol varied with region: Some beheaded suspected vampire corpses,
while others bound their feet with thorns.)

Often these rituals were clandestine, lantern-lit affairs. But,
particularly in Vermont, they could be quite public, even festive. One
vampire heart was reportedly torched on the Woodstock, Vermont, town
green in 1830. In Manchester, hundreds of people flocked to a 1793
heart-burning ceremony at a blacksmith’s forge: “Timothy Mead officiated
at the altar in the sacrifice to the Demon Vampire who it was believed
was still sucking the blood of the then living wife of Captain Burton,”
an early town history says. “It was the month of February and good
sleighing.”

Bell attributes the openness of the Vermont exhumations to
colonial settlement patterns. Rhode Island has about 260 cemeteries per
100 square miles, versus Vermont’s mere 20 per 100 square miles. Rhode
Island’s cemeteries were small and scattered among private farms,
whereas Vermont’s tended to be much larger, often located in the center
of town. In Vermont, it was much harder to keep a vampire hunt
hush-hush.

As satisfying as such mini-theories are, Bell is consumed by
larger questions. He wants to understand who the vampires and their
accusers were, in death and life. During his Middletown lecture, he
displays a picture of a man with salt-and-pepper sideburns and weary
eyes: an artist’s reconstruction of J.B.’s face, based on his skull. “I
start with the assumption that people of past generations were just as
intelligent as we are,” Bell says. “I look for the logic: Why would they
do this? Once you label something ‘just a superstition’ you lock off
all inquiry into something that could have been reasonable. Reasonable
is not always rational.” He wrote his doctoral dissertation on
African-American voodoo practitioners in the South who cast love spells
and curses; it’s hard to imagine a population more different from the
flinty, consumptive New Englanders he studies now, but Bell sees strong
parallels in how they tried to manipulate the supernatural. “People find
themselves in dire situations, where there’s no recourse through
regular channels,” he explains. “The folk system offers an alternative, a
choice.” Sometimes, superstitions represent the only hope, he says.

The enduring sadness of the vampire stories lies in the fact that
the accusers were usually direct kin of the deceased: parents, spouses
and their children. “Think about what it would have taken to actually
exhume the body of a relative,” Bell says.

The tale he always returns to is in many ways the quintessential
American vampire story, one of the last cases in New England and the
first he investigated as a new PhD coming to Rhode Island in 1981 to
direct a folklife survey of Washington County funded by the National
Endowment for the Humanities. History knows the 19-year-old,
late-19th-century vampire as Mercy Brown. Her family, though, called her
Lena.

***

Mercy Lena Brown lived in Exeter, Rhode Island—“Deserted Exeter,”
it was dubbed, or simply “one of the border towns.” It was largely a
subsistence farming community with barely fertile soil: “rocks, rocks
and more rocks,” says Sheila Reynolds-Boothroyd, president of the Exeter
Historical Association. Farmers heaped stones into tumbledown walls,
and rows of corn swerved around the biggest boulders.

In the late 19th century, Exeter, like much of agrarian New
England, was even more sparsely populated than usual. Civil War
casualties had taken their toll on the community, and the new railroads
and the promise of richer land to the west lured young men away. By
1892, the year Lena died, Exeter’s population had dipped to just 961,
from a high of more than 2,500 in 1820. Farms were abandoned, many of
them later to be seized and burned by the government. “Some sections
looked like a ghost town,” Reynolds-Boothroyd says.

And tuberculosis was harrying the remaining families.
“Consumption,” as it was called, had started to plague New England in
the 1730s, a few decades before the first known vampire scares. By the
1800s, when the scares were at their height, the disease was the leading
cause of mortality throughout the Northeast, responsible for almost a
quarter of all deaths. It was a terrible end, often drawn out over
years: a skyrocketing fever, a hacking, bloody cough and a visible
wasting away of the body. “The emaciated figure strikes one with
terror,” reads one 18th-century description, “the forehead covered with
drops of sweat; the cheeks painted with a livid crimson, the eyes
sunk...the breath offensive, quick and laborious, and the cough so
incessant as to scarce allow the wretched sufferer time to tell his
complaints.” Indeed, Bell says, symptoms “progressed in such a way that
it seemed like something was draining the life and blood out of
somebody.”

People dreaded the disease without understanding it. Though
Robert Koch had identified the tuberculosis bac­terium in 1882, news of
the discovery did not penetrate rural areas for some time, and even if
it had, drug treatments wouldn’t become available until the 1940s. The
year Lena died, one physician blamed tuberculosis on “drunkenness, and
want among the poor.” Nineteenth-century cures included drinking brown
sugar dissolved in water and frequent horseback riding. “If they were
being honest,” Bell says, “the medical establishment would have said,
‘There’s nothing we can do, and it’s in the hands of God.’”

The Brown family, living on the eastern edge of town, probably on
a modest homestead of 30 or 40 stony acres, began to succumb to the
disease in December 1882. Lena’s mother, Mary Eliza, was the first.
Lena’s sister, Mary Olive, a 20-year-old dressmaker, died the next year.
A tender obituary from a local newspaper hints at what she endured:
“The last few hours she lived was of great suffering, yet her faith was
firm and she was ready for the change.” The whole town turned out for
her funeral, and sang “One Sweetly Solemn Thought,” a hymn that Mary
Olive herself had selected.

Within a few years, Lena’s brother Edwin—a store clerk whom one
newspaper columnist described as “a big, husky young man”—sickened too,
and left for Colorado Springs hoping that the climate would improve his
health.

Lena, who was just a child when her mother and sister died,
didn’t fall ill until nearly a decade after they were buried. Her
tuberculosis was the “galloping” kind, which meant that she might have
been infected but remained asymptomatic for years, only to fade fast
after showing the first signs of the disease. A doctor attended her in
“her last illness,” a newspaper said, and “informed her father that
further medical aid was useless.” Her January 1892 obituary was much
terser than her sister’s: “Miss Lena Brown, who has been suffering from
consumption, died Sunday morning.”

As Lena was on her deathbed, her brother was, after a brief
remission, taking a turn for the worse. Edwin had returned to Exeter
from the Colorado resorts “in a dying condition,” according to one
account. “If the good wishes and prayers of his many friends could be
realized, friend Eddie would speedily be restored to perfect health,”
another newspaper wrote.

But some neighbors, likely fearful for their own health, weren’t
content with prayers. Several approached George Brown, the children’s
father, and offered an alternative take on the recent tragedies: Perhaps
an unseen diabolical force was preying on his family. It could be that
one of the three Brown women wasn’t dead after all, instead secretly
feasting “on the living tissue and blood of Edwin,” as the Providence Journal later summarized. If the offending corpse—the Journal
uses the term “vampire” in some stories but the locals seemed not
to—was discovered and destroyed, then Edwin would recover. The neighbors
asked to exhume the bodies, in order to check for fresh blood in their
hearts.

George Brown gave permission. On the morning of March 17, 1892, a party of men dug up the bodies, as the family doctor and a Journal correspondent looked on. George was absent, for unstated but understandable reasons.

After nearly a decade, Lena’s sister and mother were barely more
than bones. Lena, though, had been dead only a few months, and it was
wintertime. “The body was in a fairly well-preserved state,” the
correspondent later wrote. “The heart and liver were removed, and in
cutting open the heart, clotted and decomposed blood was found.” During
this impromptu autopsy, the doctor again emphasized that Lena’s lungs
“showed diffuse tuberculous germs.”

Undeterred, the villagers burned her heart and liver on a nearby
rock, feeding Edwin the ashes. He died less than two months later.

***

So-called vampires do escape the grave in at least one real
sense: through stories. Lena Brown’s surviving relatives saved local
newspaper clippings in family scrapbooks, alongside carefully copied
recipes. They discussed the events on Decoration Day, when Exeter
residents adorned the town’s cemeteries.

But the tale traveled much farther than they knew.

Even at the time, New England’s vampire panics struck onlookers
as a baffling anachronism. The late 1800s were a period of social
progress and scientific flowering. Indeed, many of the Rhode Island
exhumations occurred within 20 miles of Newport, high society’s summer
nucleus, where the scions of the industrial revolution vacationed. At
first, only people who’d lived in or had visited the vampire-ridden
communities knew about the scandal: “We seem to have been transported
back to the darkest age of unreasoning ignorance and blind superstition,
instead of living in the 19th century, and in a State calling itself
enlightened and christian,” one writer at a small-town Connecticut paper
opined in the wake of an 1854 exhumation.

But Lena Brown’s exhumation made news. First, a reporter from the Providence Journal
witnessed her unearthing. Then a well-known anthropologist named George
Stetson traveled to Rhode Island to probe “the barbaric superstition”
in the surrounding area.

Published in the venerable American Anthropologist
journal, Stetson’s account of New England’s vampires made waves
throughout the world. Before long, even members of the foreign press
were offering various explanations for the phenomenon: Perhaps the
“neurotic” modern novel was driving the New England madness, or maybe
shrewd local farmers had simply been pulling Stetson’s leg. A writer for
the London Post declared that whatever forces drove the
“Yankee vampire,” it was an American problem and most certainly not the
product of a British folk tradition (even though many families in the
area could trace their lineage directly back to England). In the Boston Daily Globe,
a writer went so far as to suggest that “perhaps the frequent
intermarriage of families in these back country districts may partially
account for some of their characteristics.”

One 1896 New York World clipping even found its way into
the papers of a London stage manager and aspiring novelist named Bram
Stoker, whose theater company was touring the United States that same
year. His gothic masterpiece, Dracula, was published in 1897. Some scholars have said that there wasn’t enough time for the news accounts to have influenced the Dracula
manuscript. Yet others see Lena in the character of Lucy (her very name
a tempting amalgam of “Lena” and “Mercy”), a consumptive-seeming
teenage girl turned vampire, who is exhumed in one of the novel’s most
memorable scenes. Fascinatingly, a medical doctor presides over Lucy’s
disinterment, just as one oversaw Lena’s.

Whether or not Lucy’s roots are in Rhode Island, Lena’s historic
exhumation is referenced in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House,” a
short story about a man being haunted by dead relatives that includes a
living character named Mercy.

And, through fiction and fact, Lena’s narrative continues today.

Part of Bell’s research involves going along on “legend trips,”
the modern graveside pilgrimages made by those who believe, or want to
believe, that the undead stalk Rhode Island. On legend trips, Bell is
largely an academic presence. He can even be a bit of a killjoy,
declaring that the main reason that “no grass grows on a vampire’s
grave” is that vampire graves have so many visitors, who crush all the
vegetation.

Two days before Halloween, Bell and I head through forests of
swamp maple and swamp oak to Exeter. For almost a century after Lena
died, the town, still sparsely settled, remained remarkably unchanged.
Electric lights weren’t installed in the western part of Exeter until
the 1940s, and the town had two pound keepers, charged with safekeeping
stray cattle and pigs, until 1957. In the 1970s, when I-95 was built,
Exeter evolved into an affluent bedroom community of Providence. But
visitors still occasionally turn a corner to discover the past: a dirt
road cluttered with wild turkeys, or deer hopping over stone fences.
Some elderly locals square-dance in barns on the weekends, and streets
keep their old names: Sodom Trail, Nooseneck Hill. The white wooden
Chestnut Hill Baptist Church in front of Lena’s cemetery, built in 1838,
has its original blown-glass windows.

An early Nor’easter is brewing as we pull into the church parking
lot. The heavy rain will soon turn to snow, and there’s a bullying
wind. Our umbrellas bloom inside out, like black flowers. Though it’s a
somber place, there’s no immediate clue that an accused vampire was
buried here. (Except, perhaps, for an unfortunately timed Red Cross
blood drive sign in front of the farmer’s grange next door.) Unlike
Salem, Exeter doesn’t promote its dark claim to fame, and remains in
some respects an insular community. Old-timers don’t like the hooded
figures who turn up this time of year, or the cars idling with the
lights off. They say the legend should be left alone, perhaps with good
reason: Last summer a couple of teenagers were killed on a pilgrimage to
Lena’s grave when they lost control of their car on Purgatory Road.

Most vampire graves stand apart, in wooded spots outside modern
cemetery fences, where snow melts slower and there’s a thick understory
of ferns. But the Chestnut Hill Cemetery is still in use. And here is
Lena. She lies beside the brother who ate her heart, and the father who
let it happen. Other markers are freckled with lichen, but not hers. The
stone looks to have been recently cleaned. It has been stolen over the
years, and now an iron strap anchors it to the earth. People have
scratched their names into the granite. They leave offerings: plastic
vampire teeth, cough drops. “Once there was a note that said, ‘You go,
girl,’” Bell says. Today, there’s a bunch of trampled daisies, and
dangling from the headstone’s iron collar, a butterfly charm on a chain.

***

How did 19th-century Yankees, remembered as the most pious and
practical of peoples, come to believe in vampires—especially when the
last known vampire panics at the time hadn’t occurred since 18th-century
Europe? Some modern scholars have linked the legend to vampiric
symptoms of diseases like rabies and porphyria (a rare genetic disorder
that can cause extreme sensitivity to sunlight and turn teeth
reddish-brown). Exeter residents at the time claimed that the
exhumations were “a tradition of the Indians.”

The legend originated in Slavic Europe, where the word “vampire”
first appeared in the tenth century. Bell believes that Slavic and
Germanic immigrants brought the vampire superstitions with them in the
1700s, perhaps when Palatine Germans colonized Pennsylvania, or Hessian
mercenaries served in the Revolutionary War. “My sense is that it came
more than one time through more than one source,” he says.

The first known reference to an American vampire scare is a scolding letter to the editor of the Connecticut Courant and Weekly Intelligencer,
published in June 1784. Councilman Moses Holmes, from the town of
Willington, warned people to beware of “a certain Quack Doctor, a
foreigner” who had urged families to dig up and burn dead relatives to
stop consumption. Holmes had witnessed several children disinterred at
the doctor’s request and wanted no more of it: “And that the bodies of
the dead may rest quiet in their graves without such interruption, I
think the public ought to be aware of being led away by such an
imposture.”

But some modern scholars have argued that the vampire superstition made a certain degree of practical sense. In Vampires, Burials and Death,
folklorist Paul Barber dissects the logic behind vampire myths, which
he believes originally arose from unschooled but astute observations of
decay. (Bloated dead bodies appear as if they have recently eaten; a
staked corpse “screams” due to the escape of natural gases, etc.) The
seemingly bizarre vampire beliefs, Barber argues, get at the essence of
contagion: the insight that illness begets illness, and death, death.

Vampire believers “say that death comes to us from invisible
agents,” Barber says. “We say that death comes to us from invisible
agents. The difference is that we can get out a microscope and look at
the agents.”

While New England’s farmers may have been guided by something
like reason, the spiritual climate of the day was also hospitable to
vampire rumors. Contrary to their Puritanical reputation, rural New
Englanders in the 1800s were a fairly heathen lot. Only about 10 percent
belonged to a church. Rhode Island, originally founded as a haven for
religious dissenters, was particularly lax: Christian missionaries were
at various points dispatched there from more godly communities. “The
missionaries come back and lament that there’s no Bible in the home, no
church-going whatsoever,” says Linford Fisher, a Brown University
colonial historian. “You have people out there essentially in cultural
isolation.” Mary Olive, Lena’s sister, joined a church just two weeks
before she died, her obituary said.

In place of organized worship, superstitions reigned: magical
springs with healing powers, dead bodies that bled in the presence of
their murderers. People buried shoes by fireplaces, to catch the Devil
if he tried to come down the chimney. They nailed horseshoes above doors
to ward off evil and carved daisy wheels, a kind of colonial hex sign,
into the door frames.

If superstition likely fanned the vampire panics, perhaps the
most powerful forces at play were communal and social. By 1893, there
were just 17 people per square mile in Exeter. A fifth of the farms were
fully abandoned, the fields turning slowly back into forest. In her
monograph The New England Vampire Belief: Image of the Decline,
gothic literature scholar Faye Ringel Hazel hints at a vampire metaphor
behind the westward hemorrhage: The migration “seemed to drain rural
New England of its most enterprising young citizens, leaving the old and
unfit behind.”

As Exeter teetered near collapse, maintaining social ties must
have taken on new importance. An exhumation represented, first and
foremost, a duty to one’s own kin, dead or dying: the ritual “would
alleviate the guilt someone might feel for not doing everything they
could do to save a family, to leave no stone unturned,” Bell says.

Even more significant, in small communities where disease could
spread quickly, an exhumation was “an outward display that you are doing
everything you can to fix the problem.” Residents of the already
beleaguered town were likely terrified. “They knew that if consumption
wiped out the Brown family, it could take out the next family,” Bell
says. “George Brown was being entreated by the community.” He had to
make a gesture.

The strongest testament to the power of the vampire myth is that George Brown did not, in fact, believe in it, according to the Providence Journal.
It was he who asked a doctor to perform an autopsy at the graveyard,
and he who elected to be elsewhere during the ritual. He authorized his
loved ones’ exhumation, the Journal says, simply to “satisfy
the neighbors,” who were, according to another newspaper account,
“worrying the life out of him”—a description with its own vampiric
overtones.

Perhaps it was wise to let them have their way, since George
Brown, apparently not prone to tuberculosis, had to coexist with his
neighbors well into the next century. He died in 1922.

***

Relatives of the Browns still live in Exeter and are laid to rest
on Chestnut Hill. Some, planning ahead, have erected their grave
markers. It can be disconcerting to drive past somebody’s tombstone on
the way to his or her home for a vampire-oriented interview.

On a sunny Halloween morning, when Bell has left for a vampire
folklore conference at the University of London, I return to the
cemetery to meet several Brown descendants at the farmer’s grange. They
bring, swaddled in old sheets, a family treasure: a quilt that Lena
sewed.

We spread it out on a scarred wooden table. The cotton bedspread
is pink, blue and cream. What look from a distance like large patches of
plain brown fabric are really fields of tiny daisies.

It’s the work of a farm girl, without any wasteful appliqué; Lena
clearly ran out of material in places and had to scrimp for more.
Textile scholars at the University of Rhode Island have traced her
snippets of florals, plaid and paisley to the 1870s and 1880s, when Lena
was still a child; they wondered if she used her sister’s and mother’s
old dresses for the project. Perhaps her mother’s death, too, explains
Lena’s quilting abilities, which are considerable for a teenager: She
might have had to learn household skills before other girls. The quilt
is in immaculate condition and was likely being saved for
something—Lena’s hope chest, thinks her distant descendant Dorothy
O’Neil, one of the quilt’s recent custodians, and a knowledgeable
quilter herself.

“I think the quilt is exquisite, especially in light of what she
went through in her life,” O’Neil says. “She ended up leaving something
beautiful. She didn’t know she’d have to leave it, but she did.”
Lena hasn’t left entirely. She is said to frequent a certain
bridge, manifested as the smell of roses. She appears in children’s
books and paranormal television specials. She murmurs in the cemetery,
say those who leave tape recorders there to capture her voice. She is
rumored to visit the terminally ill, and to tell them that dying isn’t
so bad.

The quilt pattern that Lena used, very rare in Rhode Island, is
sometimes called the Wandering Foot, and it carried a superstition of
its own: Anybody who slept under it, the legend said, would be lost to
her family, doomed to wander.